In The Black Cat our narrator ‘refuses even to acknowledge a disengagement from the human race’[1] This is the source of terror in the tale, the detachment our narrator shows throughout does not affect our opinion on events. Lovecraft claims the best horror authors are ‘always acting as a vivid and detached chronicler rather than as a teacher, sympathiser, or vendor of opinion.’[2] Poe clearly understood this, and extended that detachment to the narrator. When writing from a first person perspective it is difficult not to create a character whose views and characteristics affect the readers’ mind-set. The opening describes how as a child our narrator’s ‘tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the jest of my companions.’ (p. 223), and later he claims ‘I blush, I burn, I shudder’ (p. 224), as he writes of gouging out Pluto’s eye. The ‘fear of damaging or losing one’s eyes is a terrible fear of childhood’[3], and this plays into this story with the narrator depriving his first cat Pluto of one of his eyes. The fact that atrocity is committed to a domesticated animal increases the horror created in the mind of the reader. However as the narrator’s mental health diminishes in the narrative, so does the amount of guilt he shows for his deeds. By the time he buries an axe in his wife’s skull, he gives very little input regarding his feelings as he reflects on the horror he has been through going as far to say ‘I soundly and tranquilly slept; aye, slept even with the burden of murder upon my soul’ (p. 229) with no sense of remorse.
This story is the perfect example of Poe refusing to blame evil on an outside force but instead placing responsibility on man. The protagonist of the story commits murder for no reason other than an irrational hatred for his victim. There is a definite air of insanity surrounding the murderer, something that is also a big theme in the work of Lovecraft. It has been said that Poe’s tales, ‘characteristically short and impatient, tend to plunge into the dreamscape straight away’[4] and this story is a perfect example. Poe’s narrator holds up the black cat as a source of external evil, causing us to empathise with the narrator, before finally at the conclusion ‘the trapped reader finally must face himself in the same way as the imprisoned and condemned narrator.’[5] We have been sympathetic throughout, convinced that this cat is evil, when in fact it is not. Our narrator is insane, and there is ‘no externally influential force, no abstract definition of evil to direct the characters.’[6]
The insanity of our narrator is clear as ‘fear is comprised of tangible worries, like the fear of death, which rational creatures can distance through various strategies and thus remain sane’[7], and by placing the focus of his fear onto the cat that troubles him so much in the story, he is projecting his fears onto a household pet which is not distanced from him at all. His inability to cope with this grows larger as the story goes on, to the point that he later projects his fear onto another cat after he has disposed of the first. His inability to rationalise what it is he is so scared of causes him to lose his sanity, and leads to the terrible events in the story, and his casual attitude to the atrocities he has committed as he retells the story to the reader. It is in part this attitude that makes the story seem so real. Indeed that is part of the appeal of Poe. His writing displays the quality of ‘the Fantastic made Real, instead of being accepted simply as fantastic.’[8]
Poe uses the uncanny to great effect throughout the story, focusing mainly on the cats. After the narrator murders the first cat, and burns his home to the ground he is confronted with a horrible image left on one of the walls. On this wall our narrator sees ‘as if graven in bas-relief upon the white surface, the figure of a gigantic cat.’ (p. 225) His italicisation of the word cat emphasises the fear caused by this image and helps pass that fear onto the reader. The image of the cat is familiar, yet unfamiliar because of its size, and this use of the uncanny allows the reader to experience the same fear of the cat that the narrator felt whenever he witnessed it. Later in the story a second black cat enters the life of the narrator. This cat is almost identical to the previous, even deprived of one of its eyes like Pluto before it. However this cat has ‘a large, although indefinite splotch of white, covering nearly the whole region of the breast.’ (p. 226) Whereas Pluto was black all over. The uncanny element of the cat is introduced here, but Poe increases the terror related to this second cat as the white splotch begins to resemble ‘the GALLOWS!’ (p. 227), and it is the combination of the uncanny and the imagery conjured up by a cat with gallows on its breast that causes the reader to empathise with our narrator, and fear an innocent cat.
[1] Richard Badenhausen, ‘Fear and Trembling in Literature’. Studies in Short Fiction, 29, 4 (1992), p. 490
[2] H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror In Literature. [Ebook] Amazon Media, Available at: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Supernatural-Horror-in-Literature-ebook/dp/B005IZD612/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334933516&sr=1-3 [20/04/2012], p. 20
[3] Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny in Art and Literature, (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), p. 7
[4] Jack Morgan, The Biology of Horror: Gothic Literature and Film (USA: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), p. 217
[5] Richard Badenhausen, ‘Fear and Trembling in Literature’. Studies in Short Fiction, 29, 4 (1992), p. 497
[6] Chuck Miller and Tim Underwood (eds), Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror With Stephen King (New York: Warner Books, 1989), p. 7
[7] Richard Badenhausen, ‘Fear and Trembling in Literature’. Studies in Short Fiction, 29, 4 (1992), p. 492
[8] Chuck Miller and Tim Underwood (eds), Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror With Stephen King (New York: Warner Books, 1989), p. 11
The Babysitter Murders 